San Francisco 49ers: After Week 9's Loss, the Playoffs Seem out of the Question

As currently constituted, the San Francisco 49ers are not a playoff team.

I don’t merely mean they’re not in playoff position, though that is true after a heartbreaking 13-10 loss to the St. Louis Rams on Sunday.  Being a game out of the sixth playoff seed is bad, but that’s not why they’re not a playoff team.

I don’t merely mean that they don’t control their own fate for a wild-card spot, though that is also true after the loss.  It is now mathematically possible for the 49ers to win out and still end up at home in January.  That’s not why they’re a playoff team.

The reason they’re not a playoff team is because they are a bad football team right now.  There’s no way to mince words.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

The defense isn’t to blame—they were adequate for most of the day against St. Louis, and have reinforcements on the way.  The problem is the offense, and the problem with the offense is the offensive line.

In the past two games, the 49ers’ offensive line has allowed 14 sacks, destroying any chance for an offensive rhythm to develop.  This is an offense that, at times, struggled to find a rhythm the past couple years when they had one of the best offensive lines in football.  Now, with Colin Kaepernick running for his life on every other play, there’s no chance for the offense to click.

The pressure impacts everything.  It forces Kaepernick back to scared, one-read mode, where he’s forced to just throw the ball at his first target, regardless of the opposing coverage.  He’s not an experienced-enough quarterback yet to handle the intense pressure like that; he needs a second or two to make the best play.  Sometimes he’s able to salvage these things with his incredible athleticism, but when pressure is literally coming from all sides, there’s nowhere for him to go.

It hurts the run game, too, because there’s no time to run anything other than a quick-hit plow into the line.  That’s not a horrible strategy for a subsection of plays when you have Frank Gore and Carlos Hyde, but if the only offensive play you can run with any degree of confidence is those quick hits, the defense can key in on it.

Bill Haber/Associated Press

The 49ers find themselves sitting at 4-4 with a huge road trip looming—trips to New Orleans and the New York Giants.  They’re at the point where, if they don’t manage to sweep those two games, they’ll be irrelevant in December.  That’s a huge swing from anything that’s been going on in the Jim Harbaugh era.

Losing to the St. Louis Rams, coming off of a bye, when the Rams are beat up?  That’s about as abysmal of a failure as it’s possible to have this season.  It’s a scathing indictment of Harbaugh and his staff, who apparently couldn’t get the team ready to handle a near must-win game against a division rival.  This is a game a playoff team should have won; this is a game the 49ers should have won easily, and instead, they fumbled away the game on the goal line.

It doesn’t matter that the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks won Sunday; the hopes of a division title have pretty much gone out the window at this point.  The 49ers are battling for a wild-card berth at best.

If the Rams game was a weird outlier, it’d be one thing.  Instead, it was a confluence of all the problems that have plagued this team this season. 

The complete disintegration of the offensive line.  The penalty problem—nine penalties, almost all of them costly.  The lack of a fourth-quarter touchdown—the first-string offense hasn’t scored a fourth=quarter touchdown in the regular season since December 23, 2013 against the Atlanta Falcons.  The questionable play-calling.  The long stretches of game time without anything resembling a productive offense appearing.

This is almost assuredly the nadir of the 49ers' season, if simply because it’s hard to imagine it getting much worse.  The defense has reinforcements coming, and should go from being solid to great once again.  But it’s not the defense that’s struggling and causing the 49ers to crumble.

The offense needs to get it together, pronto.  They need to do it this week.  They need to beat the New Orleans Saints on the road.

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

The excellent tool provided at nfl-forecast.com indicates that the 49ers have about a 45 percent chance to make the playoffs if they beat the Saints, and about a 22 percent chance to make the playoffs if they don’t.  That’s about as big of a must-win game as you can get in the NFL.

And what, precisely, should give 49ers fans hope that they could actually go and pull that off?  Certainly nothing they’ve seen from the team since the Week 6 win over St. Louis—and, in retrospect, that was a struggle for an entire half.  Not since Week 1 have the 49ers played a complete football game.

All of a sudden, the idea that Jim Harbaugh and company are coaching for their continued employment doesn’t seem so far-fetched.  The level of play the 49ers have shown over their last two weeks not only isn’t going to get them into the playoffs, it’s not good enough to ensure that they’ll finish the season with a winning record.

The 49ers have eight more games to go.  If we see the same 49ers team we saw over the first half of the season, that will be it—there will be no playoff run.  This week is do-or-die for a team that has reached the NFC Championship Game in each of the last three seasons.  If they can’t pull something out of their hat on the road this week, their real hope of contention is over.

Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers.  Follow him @BryKno on twitter.